Facebook Safety

ID fraudsters target Facebook and other social networking sites to harvest information about you. We recommend you set your Facebook privacy options to protect against online identity theft.

How to adjust your settings
This guide walks you through some recommended privacy settings in Facebook, and shows you how to set more secure levels of privacy and reduce the chance of becoming a victim of online identity theft.

General security tips for Facebook
Adjust Facebook privacy settings to help protect your identity
Unlike some other social networking sites, Facebook provides some powerful options to protect you online — but it’s up to you to use them!

Read the Facebook Guide to Privacy
At the very bottom of every page on Facebook, there’s a link that reads “Privacy.” The linked page is “A guide to privacy on Facebook,” which contains the latest privacy functions and policies. For example, with the latest changes in May 2010, Facebook discloses information that it sets as visible to everyone and that you cannot make private. This information includes sensitive information like your name, profile picture, gender and networks. http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/about/sharing/

When in doubt, use the “Preview my profile” button on any privacy settings page to check how your information appears to others.

Think carefully about who you allow to become your friend
Once you have accepted someone as your friend they will be able to access any information about you (including photographs) that you have marked as viewable by your friends. You can remove friends at any time should you change your mind about someone.

Show “limited friends” a cut-down version of your profile
You can choose to make people ‘limited friends’ who only have access to a cut-down version of your profile if you wish. This can be useful if you have associates who you do not wish to give full friend status to, or feel uncomfortable sharing personal information with.

Disable options, then open them one by one
Think about how you want to use Facebook. If it’s only to keep in touch with people and be able to contact them then maybe it’s better to turn off the bells and whistles. It makes a lot of sense to disable an option until you have decided you do want and need it, rather than start with everything accessible.